[lug] Partitioning and modem problems

[B O'Fallon]

Hello,

I've had some luck with partitioning a large hard drive as follows:

Use Partition Magic to set up the entire disk, and use it to format each
drive/partition. Do NOT let Linux partition or format anything: it will creat
cross-linked or overlapping partitions in the MBR and sooner or later, the entire
system will collapse. (I speak from twelve hours experience recovering from this
<g>).

Create a first partition as a primary partition and install Windows on it. Make it
about 1 GB.

Create a second primary partition as the Linux swap file. Make the size of the
memory you have installed, or no bigger than 128  MB if you have 128 MB or more of
RAM.

Create a third primary partition as one humongous Linux partition as "/". Make it
whatever size you want but if Corel only needs 1.7 MB, it need not be much over
that unless you have a lot of third party programs to install. An alternate
solution is to make the "/" partition primary with an extended partition for the
other Linux partitions. On a standalone workstation, I have found the following
sizes to work very well for a stock installation, with less than 50% utilization on
any partition (with /usr being the most):

    100 MB for /
    5 MB for /home for each user
    1.5 GB for /usr
    500 MB for /usr/local
    1.5 GB for /opt (place Netscape, Wordperfect here if you use them)
    50 MB for /tmp
    50 MB for /var

Create an extended partition and put however many logical partitions on it for
Windows. This can be after all the others and however big you need.

Use Boot Magic to chose the OS at boot time, but install LILO for Linux and place
it in the boot sector of the Linux partition rather than the MBR.

B. O'Fallon

Mike McCallister wrote:

> We're getting closer on the partitioning.